Geno Auriemma cherry-picked his latest shot at Muffet McGraw
Muffet McGraw has had a long, now ongoing, back and forth with Geno Auriemma.
On Monday, Auriemma and the sports world dialed in on comments the former Notre Dame coach made in December about UConn having an “outsized” influence in women’s basketball and ESPN having an “over the top” UConn bias, from the players they discuss to the coverage the team gets in comparison to the rest of the women’s college basketball landscape. Auriemma called McGraw “bored” and “lonely” for talking about UConn. He mocked Notre Dame’s two championships, sarcastically said ESPN’s bias of UConn helped his team to 111 straight wins and said people watch UConn because they win.
“I think the bias has something to do with — if there is any — the 11 national championships, which is a lot more than two,” Auriemma told Bob Joyce on ESPN Radio.
The UConn coach conveniently chose to focus on that part of McGraw’s interview on an episode of “Off the Looking Glass” podcast hosted by Kate Fagan and Jessica Smetana. The full context of what McGraw said was more powerful than the admittedly misguided claim that ESPN loves UConn.
McGraw, on Dec. 22, spoke to her experiences as a woman in basketball, saying that she was judged — even by older women’s coaches — for her words in the same spaces while men like Auriemma said worse. She called out the patriarchy for taking the easy way out in saying they cover women’s sports by simply covering one team, UConn. And she talked about how much being a woman in sports is different today than when she was a college player.
“We expect different things from women leaders, also. So I think it’s really hard for women leaders to be [tough and confident],” McGraw said, adding later in response to another prompt: “For women especially [back in the ‘70s and ‘80s] we would go in and just be so happy to get what we got ... my generation has just been fighting this battle for so long that we all look to say ‘thank you’ more than ‘yeah, and we deserve more.’”
McGraw, much later in the show was then asked directly about her opinion on the UConn bias. Fagan and Smetana prefaced their question with former Stanford star Nneka Ogwumike’s snub from Team USA at last summer’s Olympics.
It’s no shock anymore that former UConn players seem to have a knack for being called to represent the Olympics-bound team. But when Ogwumike, a WNBA MVP and 2016 champion among her scores of accolades, was left off the list Candace Parker — who was also left off the roster in 2016 and 2020 — called out the entire selection committee and Auriemma, who had influence selecting those teams: “[Nneka’s] the only MVP not to make an Olympic team, which is bulls—t.”
Auriemma, head coach of the Huskies since 1985, coached Team USA at the 2012 and 2016 Summer Games. South Carolina’s Dawn Staley led the team to gold last summer in Tokyo.
The show’s hosts didn’t ask McGraw to talk about Team USA, but of whether such a bias in women’s basketball exists.
So McGraw replied.
“Absolutely. And I think if you read anything that Candace Parker said, ‘I didn’t make the USA team because Geno didn’t like me...’ and I think that’s absolutely true,” McGraw said then pivoting to the number of current UConn players still being considered for Player of the Year awards.
“What they’ve done has been amazing. I think people measure their team by them,” she praised. “When we joined the Big East, we were like, ‘We want to get to where they are. That’s what we want to be.’ We’re trying to emulate them.”
McGraw then agreed with the hosts that coverage of UConn and its players is “an easy out” for networks and publications to say they cover women’s sports as opposed to doing more research on players from other teams.
“I think there are a lot of great coaches out there, but we don’t know about any of them because so much of the attention is on one team,” she said.
McGraw may have unintentionally baited Auriemma with some not so poignant takes, deflecting attention from the main point of her appearance on the show: being a fierce women’s sports advocate and a legendary coach who took up a mantle no one thought could be filled again after Pat Summit’s death. But Auriemma cynically pouncing on a cherry-picked comment says more about him than McGraw’s faux pas about championship numbers.
